One view from the First International Conference Free Knowledge, Free Technology - Education for a free information society in Barcelona (Spain), 15 July 2008. Recap of remarks by Richard M. Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, including: a) Free Software is about giving freedom to the user and respecting the work done by the community of programmers, b) Electronic book readers are evil, c) Free content for a free life. From the Q&A section - Stephen Downes: should we make it compulsory to share our software at classrooms? does this apply or extrapolate to educational resources? Stallman: sharing should be a fundamental value to be taught at schools, so yes, sharing software should be compulsory, and same applies to content. -BD
Ismael Pena-Lopez,
ICTlogy,
July 17, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Schools, Richard Stallman, Newsletters, Books]
[Comment]

Sorry, We're Open
Jim Groom responds (along with several commenters) to Tuesday's article referenced in OLDaily about Blackboard and Sakai partnering. Jim is "getting more and more confused with the term "open" when used in the context of educational technology these days." He continues, "Point is that an announcement like this has very little to do with open source innovation, and everything to do with a marketing strategy to linguistically co-opt the term open. The word is used 21 times in this article, and while BlackBoard is working with the IT staff at Syracuse University to create a "dongle" (I refuse to call it a bridge) to connect with Sakai (hardly revolutionary),the actual language in the article is what's important." -BD
Jim Groom,
bavatuesdays,
July 17, 2008 [Link] [Tags: Marketing, Open Source, Paradigm Shift, Blackboard Inc.]
[Comment]

"[The NRC Senior Executive Committee] SEC has established a policy making it mandatory, starting in January 2009, for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed publications (articles, proceedings, books, book chapters) and technical reports in [the forthcoming NRC Institutional Repository, to be called] NPArC. The SEC has also approved an update to NRC Form 22 Licence to Publish (Crown Copyright) that will explicitly state NRC's intention to deposit these publications in NPArC."

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